by Roni Sarig
Video has been at the forefront of the Residents’ work from the start. Acknowledged as one of the first groups to develop narrative music video, the Residents weaved together visual and musical ideas years before MTV existed. And unlike today’s videos, work such as One Minute Movies (a companion to their Commercial Album) had more in common with avant-garde film than cola advertisements. By the early ‘80s, when the group went on tour with their Mole Show – a fantasy “opera” about the struggles between the immigrant laborer Moles and the industrial xenophobe Chubs – the Residents were pioneering a concept that blurred the lines between concert, theater, visual art, video, animation, and dance.
In the ‘90s, the Residents have increasingly incorporated computer technology in their work. Recordings have become less of a focus, and the group has made a reputation for itself in the world of CD-ROM. Beginning with 1993’s Freak Show, the Residents have produced award-winning discs that mix music with software design, computer animation, video, and narrative. In 1994, they were one of the first groups to offer an enhanced CD that could be played in both a disc player and drive. As removed from mainstream music as ever, the Residents have also managed to maintain their place at the forefront of art.
DISCOGRAPHY
Meet the Residents (Ralph, 1974; ESD, 1988); the defiantly eccentric debut album, reissued with the initial four-song release, Santa Dog.
The Third Reich and Roll (Ralph, 1976; ESD, 1987); a parody of fascism in the commercial culture of pop music.
Duck Stab / Buster & Glen (Ralph, 1978; ESD, 1987); the closest they came to a pop record, this was reissued with the Goosebump EP.
Not Available (Ralph, 1978; ESD, 1988); a 1974 recording that was made with no intention of release.
Eskimo (Ralph, 1979; ESD, 1987); a bit of fake ethnomusicology that is nevertheless one of their most musically successful recordings.
Diskomo / Goosebump (Ralph, 1980); a disco remix of Eskimo, with an added EP of nursery rhyme-based songs.
The Commercial Album (Ralph, 1980; ESD, 1988); the best-known album, a collection of 40 one-minute songs (increased to 50 on the reissue).
March of the Moles (Ralph, 1981; ESD, 1988); the first installment of the Mole Trilogy, including the Intermission release.
The Tunes of Two Cities (Ralph, 1982; ESD, 1990); the second part of the Mole Trilogy.
Residue of the Residents (Ralph, 1983); a compilation.
George & James (Ralph, 1984); the first of the American Composers series, featuring the music of George Gershwin and James Brown.
Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats (Ralph, 84; ESD, 1993); soundtrack to a documentary about the band’s aborted Vileness Fats project, reissued with their Census Taker soundtrack.
The Big Bubble (Black Shroud-Ralph, 1985; ESD, 1990); skipping the third part, this is the “fourth” and final part of the Mole Trilogy.
Heaven? (Rykodisc, 1986); a random and decontextualized compilation.
Hell! (Rykodisc, 1986); same as Heaven?, but with worse songs.
Stars & Hank Forever (Ralph, 1986); the second of the American Composers series, spotlighting the music of John Philips Sousa and Hank Williams.
The Eyeball Show (13th Anniversary) Live in Japan (Ralph, 1986)
God in Three Persons (Rykodisc, 1988); a record investigating sexual obsession, also released in excerpted instrumental form as God in Three Persons Soundtrack.
Buckaroo Blues & Black Barry (Ralph cass., 1989); the combined first and second parts of Cube E, a Residents-style deconstruction of early American music.
The King & Eye (Enigma / Restless, 1989); the third part of the Cube E project, a collection of Elvis songs done in the Residents’ inimitable style.
Stranger Than Supper (UWEB Special Products, 1991); a collection of live recordings and rarities.
Freak Show (Cryptic Official Product, 1990; ESD, 1995); the band’s first CD-ROM project.
Our Finest Flowers (Ralph / ESD, 1993); a “greatest hits” collection to celebrate the group’s 20th anniversary, it features reconstructed and recombined bits of past songs.
Gingerbread Man (ESD, 1994); an Enhanced CD, also released as music-only, featuring a series of character sketches.
Bad Day on the Midway (Inscape, 1995); a CD-ROM game, released in music-only form as Have a Bad Day (ESD, 1996)
Hunters: The World of Predators and Prey (Milan / BMG, 1995); the soundtrack to a Discovery Channel series on wild animals.
Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses (Rykodisc, 1997); a terrific two-CD 25-year retrospective.
TRIBUTE: Eyesore: A Stab at the Residents (Vaccination, 1996); a collection of quirky post-Residents artists such as Primus, Stan Ridgeway, Cracker, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 doing Residents songs.
PERE UBU
David Thomas, Pere Ubu (from Search & Destroy #6, 1978):
The vision is to create modern music. If indeed we are not going to reach the future, somebody better bring the future now.
In their mix of classic ‘60s rock with wheezy synthesizers, harsh found sounds, fractured and angular song structures, and absurd humor, Pere Ubu was a pre-punk band with a post-punk sound. More organic and tuneful than most experimental music, but too stark and disjointed for consideration by the mainstream, they were purveyors of strange folk music for a post-industrial age. Commonly branded “avant garage” for their duel loyalties to down-home rock and out-there noise, Pere Ubu’s imprint can be detected on husky-voiced guitarists such as Frank Black and Bob Mould (as well as their respective original bands, the Pixies and Hüsker Dü), and on newer obscurantists like Pavement and Guided by Voices.
Bob Pollard, Guided by Voices:
They swam in a sea of their own, they did their own thing. Along with that whole Cleveland thing, Pere Ubu were way ahead of their time.
At its core, Pere Ubu is a Cleveland band. Its roots were in the suburban Midwestern tradition of garage rock, but they played like a band of intellectuals lost in a post-apocalyptic no-man’s land (which in the pre-urban renewal ‘70s, was just what Cleveland looked like). Pere Ubu arose in 1975 out of the ashes of Rocket from the Tombs, one of a small group of local bands (including the Electric Eels and the Mirrors) that played original music. Two Rocket alumni, David Thomas (whose stage name was Crocus Behemoth) and Peter Laughner, put together a group of local musicians (which Thomas named Pere Ubu after a character from a play by the French absurdist Alfred Jarry) as a one-time only studio band to record two Rocket favorites, 30 Seconds over Tokyo and Heart of Darkness.
Bob Mould, Sugar / Hüsker Dü:
Their music sort of scared me the first time I heard it, it’s really ominous and different. Pere Ubu seemed to really capture what it would be tike to live in an industrial city. Their music was like industrial soundscapes. They really presented the whole thing well, you couldn’t tell if they were factory workers or artists. The lyrics were really oblique, the melodies were different. It wasn’t punk rock but it was really energetic.
When Thomas released the songs as a single, it became necessary to play a live show to promote the record, and Pere Ubu got together again. One show led to another, then another, and by the time they recorded a second single in 1976, the band had settled into semipermanent status. Still, Pere Ubu was far from stable. The first notable departure was original bassist Tim Wright, who moved to New York and joined the no-wavers in DNA, a band that took Pere Ubu’s disjointed and dissonant sound to a new extreme. Laughner, who had been one of the group’s songwriters and creative leaders also left, to form his own band, Friction. In June of 1977, at the age of 24, Laughner died, succumbing to the excesses of substance abuse. He is best remembered for early Pere Ubu compositions as well as the Dead Boys’ “Ain’t It Fun” (which Gun N’ Roses covered), and two albums of Laughner’s solo recordings have been released posthumously.
While in Pere Ubu, Laughner had been a force toward more traditional rock styles. With him gone, Thomas’s more avant leanings gradually took hold – though
Thomas preferred to define himself as pop. “I personally consider Pere Ubu to be a pop band, totally the same as Wings or the Archies,” Thomas told the punk zine Search & Destroy, “It’s just that we’re doing more modern and therefore better pop music. We’re not concerned with the pop music of the past.”
Scott Kannberg, Pavement:
They were a huge musical reference. Their songs are warped. To me they’re like classic rock, just as classic as Boston or whatever. I see a lot of similarities in our early stuff, with the tape loop electronic stuff running with a classic song.
With two standout albums released nine months apart, 1978 was the year Pere Ubu finally took off. Like their earlier singles, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing were well received in England and proved a major influence on post-punk. Though still capable of rocking, Pere Ubu’s quirkier side emerged: Thomas’s yelping and squealing of fractured melodies; abrasive, industrial sound effects (such as the seeping steam in The Modern Dance); Allen Ravenstine’s inventive synth playing; and a bizarre stage presence that seemed to come (like the band’s name) straight out of absurdist theater. Anchoring it all was Tony Maimone’s dubby bass and Scott Krauss’s always on-the-mark drumming.
Marceilus Hall, Railroad Jerk:
They were doing artistic things with instruments that had never been done before. Angular rock and high, dramatic singing. He had this way of singing I thought was cool because he was trying to sound helpless at times. That kind of desperation in the voice appealed to me then, and it still does.
Following 1979’s New Picnic Time, Pere Ubu underwent another significant change. When Tom Herman, whose angular guitar work helped define the group, quit the band, he was replaced by Mayo Thompson, who had been and continued to be leader of Red Krayola. Thompson’s presence, added to Thomas’s already well-defined eccentricities, made the albums The Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man Pere Ubu’s most challenging work.
By 1982’s Bailing Man, Krauss had been replaced by Cleveland – via-New York drummer Anton Fier, who’d just finished stints with the Feelies and Lounge Lizards. The band was plagued by infighting and, worse, a lack of inspiration. Thomas, who released his first solo album in 1981, decided to concentrate on his solo career, and Pere Ubu entered an extended period of inactivity. Though they would reconvene in the late ‘80s, their influence on subsequent generations of avant-rockers was already secure.
David Thomas’s 1987 solo album Blame the Messenger featured a band (called the Wooden Birds) that included former Ubus Allen Ravenstine and Tony Maimone (who later played with They Might Be Giants and Bob Mould), as well as Cleveland guitarist Jim Jones. Somewhat by default, this band – with the return of Krauss and addition of second drummer Chris Cutler (of Henry Cow) – became the re-formed Pere Ubu that resumed recording in 1988. Though initially they sounded quite close to their last incarnation, by 1989 the band had taken a more pop approach. In the early ‘90s, however, former Captain Beefheart guitarist Eric Drew Feldman (who later played with Frank Black, P.J. Harvey, and Belgian band Deus) joined the group, reaffirming their idiosyncratic roots. In 1998, after a period where Thomas led a band with none of the original members, Tom Herman and Jim Jones returned for the album Pennsylvania.
DISCOGRAPHY
The Modern Dance (Blank, 1978); an adventurous and fully realized debut.
Datapanik in the Year Zero EP (Radar, 1978); a collection of the pre-Modern Dance singles, not to be confused with the identically named box set.
Dub Housing (Chrysalis, 1978); the creative peak of the early Ubu records.
New Picnic Time (Chrysalis [UK], 1979).
The Art of Walking (Rough Trade, 1980); with the addition of Mayo Thompson, the band digs deeper into eccentricity.
390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo (Rough Trade, 1981); a live album capturing the early Pere Ubu lineup in all its ragged glory.
Song of the Bailing Man (Rough Trade, 1982); the final studio album before the extended hiatus.
Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection (Twin/Tone, 1985); an interim collection of early singles.
The Tenement Year (Enigma, 1988); the strong return after a six-year absence.
Cloudland (Fontana, 1989); a reflection of Thomas’s more conventional approach to songwriting.
One Man Drives while the Other Man Screams (Rough Trade, 1989); a second set of live recordings, this one from the ‘78-‘81 incarnation.
Worlds in Collision (Fontana, 1991); a less successful pop-oriented album.
Story of My Life (Imago, 1993); their major label peak that ironically coincided with a return to eccentricity.
Ray Gun Suitcase (Tim/Kerr, 1995); called their final album, it returned to a more challenging era of Ubu music.
Datapanik in the Year Zero (Geffen, 1996); a five-CD box set that includes the first five studio albums, rare live recordings, and a disc featuring recordings of Ubu members’ side projects and other bands.
Pennsylvania (Tim/Kerr, 1998); features the return of Tom Herman and Jim Jones.
RED KRAYOLA
MAYO THOMPSON
Mayo Thompson, Red Krayola:
We came from an avant-garde tradition that tries to push limits. We saw ourselves connected to an intellectual tradition more than a musical one. We didn’t want to be the same as everybody, just popular and part of the youth movement. We wanted to be the greatest and most radical of all. We saw our competition as John Cage and Miles Davis. We’d look at some of these ‘60s bands and say, “Oh, you think you’re wild? Have you heard Albert Ayler? Get serious.”
The Red Krayola (or Red Crayola as they were known in Europe, outside the reach of crayon trademark lawyers) has been around for over 30 years. Through each of its four distinct incarnations two things have remained constant: first, the inspired leadership of Mayo Thompson; second, obscurity. Despite the latter the Red Krayola have left their mark on a few key bands who’ve distilled certain elements and passed them on to a wider audience. It can be heard in the warbly eccentricities of Pere Ubu, in the psychedelia of Spacemen 3, in the Texas freakiness of the Butthole Surfers, in the Marxist pop of Stereolab, and in the post-rock music of Tortoise and Gastr del Sol.
Thompson formed the Red Crayola as a quintet in Houston in 1966, though the group was soon pared down to a trio featuring Thompson on guitars and vocals, Steve Cunningham on bass, and Frederick (Rick) Barthelme (now a well-known author of minimalist fiction) on drums. Gigging through 1966 and early ‘67, the group developed a dedicated core of fans, friends, and associated artists that called themselves the Familiar Ugly. A sort of Texan version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the group participated on stage in the Red Crayola’s “free form freakouts,” massive spontaneous cacophonies that also appear six times on the group’s debut, The Parable of Arable Land. The record also featured their International Artists labelmate Roky Erickson (of the 13th Floor Elevators), who played harmonica and organ on more structured garage psychedelia such as Transparent Radiation and Hurricane Fighter Plane.
Though Parable captured the group in its early stage as a conventionally structured – though certainly unusual – rock band, the Red Crayola wanted much more. As art students without much musical experience, from the start the group intended to work more in an avant-garde art context than as a rock band. Their reference points were experimental music and free jazz, as well as their “general revulsion for the lack of nerve of most people in the world.”
After collaborating with guitar improviser John Fahey in California, the group returned to Houston at the end of ‘67 and made a second record, a radical departure they called Coconut Hotel. A vigorous deconstruction of traditional pop elements, the record featured tracks like Vocal, Piano, and Guitar – formless demonstrations of the various sounds each instrument could make – as well as 36 different One-Second Pieces that explored the various permutations a band could represent in a single instant. It was closer to the experiments of Cage than a rock album, and the group’s label wasn’t sure what to do with it
. When Barthelme left the group and Thompson returned to California, the record was shelved, not to be properly released until 1995.
David Grubbs, solo / Gastr del Sol:
I was very fortunate to hear the Red Krayola first when I was in high school. Their songs prompted question after question. Why fragments? Where are the handrails? What is that sound on The Shirt? (This was an important adolescent acousmatic experience.) The song Music obviated punk’s fourth wall. I was scandalized by it in the best possible way.
In 1968, International Artists convinced Mayo to return and make one more album. God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail on Her, which featured Thompson and Cunningham (and a new spelling of Krayola to avoid trademark infringement), was slightly less extreme than Coconut Hotel but sufficiently bizarre to ensure its commercial failure. Though it was the most successful integration of the group’s experimentation and art song style, by the time it was released the group had ceased to exist. God Bless did, though, point to the more acoustic, song-oriented approach Thompson took when he made a solo album in 1970. The tuneful Corky’s Debt to His Father featured the cream of Houston musicians, but, like Coconut Hotel, was not formally released at the time. A lost classic for many decades, it was finally made domestically available in 1994.
Jim O’Rourke, solo / Gastr del Sol:
Corky’s Debt to His Father helped increase my interest in songwriters. It always struck me how wonderful that record’s arrangements were. It helped move me away from wanting to do tape music, and into producing records and making arrangements. Mayo has so many divergent interests – sociological, linguistic, musical – and the music is so much a result of him trying to put it together.
